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The following section of the guide describes the network components and design concepts of the 5G installation.
The PowerSwitch S3048-ON 1000BASE-T top-of-rack (ToR) switch is the industry’s first
1GbE enterprise switching platform to deliver both an industry-hardened operating system and support for open networking that accommodates third-party operating systems. This open networking platform is built for high-performance software-defined data centers, allowing users to run traditional workloads and deploy new workloads. By using the S3048-ON switch, you can run operating system options that are optimized for diverse deployment needs on a common hardware platform and architecture.
The following figure shows the PowerSwitch S3048-ON switch:
PowerSwitch S5232F-ON 25/100GbE fixed switches provide state-of-the-art high-density 25/100 GbE ports and a broad range of functionality to meet the growing demands of today’s telco data center environment. The compact, single-RU, S5232F-ON switch provides performance and flexibility for a variety of network designs. In high-density deployments, you can use the S5232F-ON switch with breakout cables to provide up to 128 10 GbE or 25 GbE ports.
The minimum software release that is required for PTP support is OS10 Release 10.5.2.6, which supports IEEE-1588v2 with the G.8275.1 telco profile and one-step timing.
Note: The PowerSwitch S5232F-ON switch does not support SyncE timing on SFP+ ports 33 and 34. SyncE is supported only on certain optics. For a list of SyncE-compatible devices, see Appendix III of the ITU G.8262 standard.
The following figure shows the PowerSwitch S5232F-ON switch:
The vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is configured on the hosts in each tier, providing a similar network configuration across multiple hosts. Each ESXi host has multiple port groups that are configured and allotted to specific VLANs. The VDS has a separate uplink connection for the physical data center network, separating uplink traffic from other network traffic. These uplinks are mapped with a pair of physical NICs on each host to connect the virtual switches to the physical switch.
The management workload domain consists of infrastructure and VM networks, as shown in the following figure:
The edge cluster consists of infrastructure, management, and workload networks, as shown in the following figure:
The compute cluster consists of networks that are required to deploy tenants, as shown in the following figure:
This section provides a description of the networks that are used to support this deployment.
Leaf switches are configured as a VLT pair.
The integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) network is used for configuring host BIOS parameters, installing host software, and providing connectivity to the TCA and vCenter user interfaces. The iDRAC is a piece of hardware that sits on the server motherboard and enables systems administrators to update and manage Dell systems, even when the server is turned off. The iDRAC provides both a web interface and a command-line interface through which administrators can perform remote management tasks.
The networks that are used to deploy 5G Core are listed in the following table and described below:
Network | VDS/VSS group | Interface type | VLANs | Subnets | Mask | Gateway |
VM network | vSwitch0 | VLAN | 0 | Default | Default | Default |
ESXI management network | Infra_Network_VDS | VLAN | 100 | 192.168.100.100 | /24 | 192.168.100.254 |
VM management network | VM_Network_VDS
| VLAN | 20 | 192.168.20.100 | /24 | 192.168.20.254 |
VSAN network | Infra_Network_VDS | VLAN | 300 | 192.168.3.100 | /24 | 192.168.3.254 |
VMotion network | Infra_Network_VDS | VLAN | 200 | 192.168.2.100 | /24 | 192.168.2.254 |
VCSA A network | VM_Network_VDS | VLAN | 30 | 192.168.30.100 | /24 | 192.168.30.254 |
Overlay network | Edge_VM_Network_VDS | VLAN | 700 | 192.168.7.100 | /24 | 192.168.7.254 |
External network | Edge_VM_Network_VDS | VLAN | 40 | 172.16.60.100 | /24 | 172.16.60.254 |
The VM network enables VMs to communicate with one another, which means that VMs running on an ESXi host can connect to the virtual and physical network.
This network is used for ESXI host management traffic. It enables login into individual ESXi UIs to view or change configurations.
Note: VMware ESXi is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor that VMware has developed for deploying and serving virtual computers.
The VM management network is where the VM connects to vCenter Server and ESXi hosts.
This network is used for vSAN shared storage traffic. VMware vSAN is an software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with the VMware ESXi hypervisor. Software-defined storage products provision and manage storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware.
This network is used for vSphere vMotion traffic. vMotion enables the live migration of running VMs from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity. vMotion is a key enabling technology for creating a dynamic, automated, and self-optimizing data center.
VMware vCenter HA protects the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) against host and hardware failures. The active-passive architecture of the solution helps reduce downtime when you patch VCSA. The VCSA HA feature works as a cluster of three VMs containing active, passive, and witness nodes.
GENEVE (Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation) provides the overlay capability in VMware NSX-T to create isolated, multitenant broadcast domains across data center fabrics. GENEVE enables you to create elastic, logical networks that span physical network boundaries, providing extensibility while still using the offload capabilities of NICs for performance improvement. Using the GENEVE overlay, VMware NSX-T isolates the network into a pool of capacity and separates the consumption of these services from the underlying physical infrastructure. You can organize the pool of network capacity in logical networks that are directly attached to specific applications. For more information, see What is GENEVE?
The edge node in VMware NSX-T uses the external network for north-south peering with external devices.
Note: NSX-T data center is the software-defined networking component for Telco Cloud Platform. NSX-T enables you to create, delete, and manage software-based virtual networks.